by Lynn Brock
In the afternoons, as he sat by the windows of the sitting-room, he saw his project almost as one of those skeleton schemes which he had been accustomed to construct before beginning the writing of a play—a brief jotted note of the central action of each act. As yet there were no details, but the outline was definite. He might have scribbled on his writing-block:
And then turned over and written on the next page:
SCENARIO
Act 1. Sc. 1.
Already his imagination was busy with details, but it weighed them and pondered over them with almost complete detachment from reality. Already it was foreseeing difficulties; but they were the difficulties of a play which would be adjusted within the enclosure of the sitting-room walls, just as so many difficulties in the plots or characterisation of his novels had been adjusted. There was hardly any thought of possible interference from outside agencies in the long, motionless reveries of his afternoons. His plot was framed by the four walls that had shut in all his creative thoughts for two years. The world with its suspicion and its vigilance lay outside, an irrevelance.
Even when he went out into it, his plan, always in his thoughts, remained apart from it. He had begun to walk regularly, selecting usually the most frequented streets and roads of the neighbourhood. The faces that passed him, depressed, anxious, or merely blank, betrayed no awareness of him; the eyes that rested on him for a moment glanced on to a shop-window or a passing car. He was surprised when, one evening, a glove which he had dropped that afternoon when alighting from a ’bus at a crowded corner nearly a mile distant from Downview Road was returned to him at his flat by an elderly man whom, to his knowledge, he had never seen before.
‘I was in the ’bus,’ the visitor explained, ‘and saw you drop the glove as you got out. As I happened to know where you lived, I thought I’d take charge of it and bring it along to you the first time I was coming this way.’
‘How did you know that I lived here?’ Whalley asked.
‘Well, I saw you one day a couple of weeks ago, coming into this house. And so, of course, I recognised you in the ’bus. I’m like that. I never forget a face once I’ve seen it. Mother was the same …’
The ‘of course’ arrested Whalley’s interest for a moment; this man took it for granted that he should remember every face he had seen once. But the incident was soon forgotten as the merest of accidents. There would be no accidents—everything would be foreseen—patted into perfect shape—made accident-proof. It was simply a matter of adjustment while one sat at the little oval table and drew curlimacews.
Sometimes, when he had sat for an hour without any movement save the lighting of a new cigarette from an old one, he got up and went into the bedroom. It was the place in which most of her survived for him. He opened the door of her wardrobe and touched a frock or a jumper, trying to conjure up places in which she had worn it, pressing the material to his nostrils to assure himself that her perfume still clung to it. Or he picked up some knick-knack from her dressing-table and tried to see her fingers using it. For some reason unknown to him, she had always kept her best pair of shoes at the foot of her bed instead of in the boot-press in the passage. They still stood there and there was always a little dust to flick from their toes before he went back to his chair in the sitting-room.
2
Knayle had prattled away. There had been no difficulty in finding out where the Prossips had gone; he had volunteered the information that their maid, according to Hopgood’s account, had found a new place as housemaid with his friends, the Grevilles. Whalley had known that her name was Agatha; Knayle had supplied the surname Judd. The Grevilles, he had added, kept a large staff of servants; Miss Agatha Judd’s new situation would be an improvement upon her last.
The Grevilles had been old friends of Elsa’s and Whalley had occasionally accompanied her on her visits to the house, of which his mind contained a definite picture. He saw it as he and Elsa had always approached it. One turned right-hand out of the dullness of Durston Road into Abbey Road—a quiet, almost rural road whose further end was already in the country. In the whole length of the road there were not more than a dozen houses, all of them large and standing in extensive grounds whose trees concealed them, he fancied, entirely from view. Dense shrubberies bordered the road on both sides, separated from the pathways by low ornamental railings. Little traffic passed along it; it led nowhere in particular and existed almost solely for the purposes of the wealthy residents who lived there in select seclusion. Sometimes one met a large car or a tradesman’s van and saw a solitary pedestrian disappear round a bend. Usually the road was deserted—though, doubtless, in the evenings there would be occasional courting couples straying along the footpaths.
One went along for nearly half a mile. The third gate on the left-hand side was the Canynges’. The fourth, two or three hundred yards further on, was the Grevilles’. The gates had always been open when he had seen them, and he saw them open. A narrow drive ran away from them through a shrubbery, overhung by the trees. It curved twice, and then one saw the house some fifty yards ahead—heavy, ugly, pretentious, but saturated with wealth and security. A man-servant out of one of Pinero’s plays opened the hall-door …
If one went back to the gates and looked up the drive—the shrubbery grew very thick on either side—one could stand upright amongst the shrubs without being seen. What were they? Laurels, some of them; he remembered the smell on hot days. Round the first curve of the drive one was out of sight of both from the road, through the gates, and from the house. There …
He must go and look at it—one day soon, now—and verify his picture. Perhaps go up the drive to the curve and make certain that the shrubbery was as dense as he remembered it—perhaps decide which side of the drive he would select. It would be necessary to do that twice—in the daylight and after dark.
The Grevilles kept a lot of servants. No doubt they were well treated and had afternoons and evenings off, probably twice a week. One would have to be careful. It would be necessary to keep watch in order to discover on what evenings she went out—at what hour she returned. There would be other servants coming down and going up the drive in the evenings—curious, observant girls, suspicious men. One would have to be careful. One would have to wear different clothes.
But all that could be adjusted. And who would—who could—suspect? No one—not even she herself, if by some accident she saw him and recognised him. But there would be no accidents.
Probably on her evenings off she would have to get back to the house by half-past ten at latest. Some night—a Wednesday night or a Friday night—she would come back in the darkness along Abbey Road, (were there lamps along Abbey Road?) hurrying because she was late and the road was lonely. Probably she would have spent the evening at a cinema with some young fellow. But Abbey Road would be too far out for him at that hour; he would almost certainly leave her, at latest, at the ’bus halt in Conyngham Place. She would come hurrying along Abbey Road alone, turn in through the gates, hurry up the drive, turn the first bend, see him step out from the shrubbery—and stop. She must see him and recognise him before he struck—she must know what was going to happen to her—and why. That was a difficulty, because she mustn’t be allowed to scream. It would be very quiet out there at that hour. One would have to think over that and adjust it and pat it into shape. It was simply a matter of tiny moments—of position …
Then, when it was done and when he had made certain that it was done (one would have to make quite certain) and she was lying in among the shrubs, he would go quietly back along Abbey Road, turn in to Durston Road, and who would—who could—suspect? No one.
He would come back to the flat and sit down there by the sitting-room fire and begin to think about Act II.
One afternoon he walked to the further end of Abbey Road and back again. Some fifty or sixty cars and vans passed him before he reached Durston Road again. He met thirty or forty people, including the Edwarde-Lewin girls, who bowed to him, and Mrs Canyn
ge, who cut him dead. The trees had thinned and the upper windows of some of the houses, including the Grevilles’, were visible from the road. The shrubberies, he discovered, were not all so dense as he had fancied them. There were lamps along the road. They were widely-spaced, it was true, but one of them stood only a little away from the Grevilles’ gates. A patrolling policeman was a rarity anywhere in Rockwood—a phenomenon in its outskirts; but he met a policeman that afternoon as he turned the corner into Durston Road.
On the following afternoon he repeated the same walk. Not a single car passed him in Abbey Road; the only persons he met there on foot were two small boys from the College, who passed him under one of the lamps, absorbed in a discussion concerning reinforced concrete.
He slackened his pace as he approached the Grevilles’ gates on his return journey and listened. Excepting for the hooting of a tug down in the river there was no sound. He walked up the drive until he reached its first bend and then made a hurried exploration of the shrubbery. On both sides it ran back for a considerable distance from the drive. There was no necessity to explore it to its further limits; it was sufficient that, near the drive, it formed an entirely satisfactory hiding-place. He decided upon the right-hand side as he faced towards the house. His left hand must be the nearer to her as she came up the drive.
3
From the first he had told himself that he must guard against hurry. There must be an interval, sufficiently long to dissociate the Prossips and Agatha Judd from the top flat. They must be given time to settle down in their new surroundings, to develop new habits and associations, to forget to talk about things that had been of interest and importance to them in June. Nearly four months had already intervened; another two, or, at the outside, three, would, he estimated, completely detach them from all possible connection with himself.
As the interminable, eventless days went by, however, it began to appear to him that this estimate was excessive. In a few days a girl like Agatha Judd—unusually good-looking, pert, assured, and feather-brained—would have established herself as a conspicuous feature of the Grevilles’ household, squabbled with her fellow-maids, set up flirtations with the men-servants, and forgotten all about the Prossips and their flat. In a few weeks she would have become a familiar figure in Abbey Road and its immediate neighbourhood—the Grevilles’ pretty housemaid. Probably her vanity would restrain her from talking to her fellow-servants about her last place; to do so would involve the admission that she had been a general maid in a small flat.
Though Mrs Greville, of course, would know who her last employers had been and where they had lived. There was that to think over. But why should anyone think of enquiring as to her last situation, when she had been with the Grevilles for two months? Or, for that matter, a month?
A doubt arose in his mind. His plan had supposed Agatha Judd fixed permanently in her new setting. But was she?
She was an impudent, careless, malicious girl. Mrs Greville might decide that she was unsuitable and dismiss her. If that happened, it would be very difficult to trace her to a new place. She might leave Rockwood—go to Bath, or Cleeveham, or even to London. Knayle was a great friend of the Grevilles, but Mrs Greville would be extremely unlikely to discuss the whereabouts of a dismissed housemaid with him. And one would have to be careful with Knayle. That smile of his was curious.
Perhaps Mrs Greville had already dismissed her.
He meditated upon this anxiety for an afternoon and then went out to buy cigarettes. His way to the tobacconist’s led him past Knayle’s garage and he saw her standing in the doorway, talking to Chidgey. When he passed again on his way back to the flat, Chidgey was still standing in the doorway—alone now—and saluted him gloomily.
In the earlier part of the year Chidgey had lost the effective use of a raincoat under rather unusual circumstances. He had left the raincoat lying over the saddle of his motor-cycle at the side of a country road while he refreshed himself with sandwiches in a near-by field. Returning to the motor-cycle he had found a cow eating his raincoat. He had interviewed the owner of the cow without any satisfactory result and had subsequently consulted Mr Knayle as to his chances of obtaining compensation. Mr Knayle had laughed and said, ‘Better ask Mr Whalley, Chidgey. I understand that he’s a person learned in the law.’ Recalling this remark of the guv’nor’s, Chidgey threw away his cigarette and overtook Whalley with an urgent ‘Beg pardon, sir. May I speak to you for a moment?’
‘Certainly.’
‘You’ll excuse me asking you, sir, but are you connected with the law? Mr Knayle happened to mention to me one day that you were.’
‘Rather distantly,’ Whalley replied in some surprise. ‘However—Well?’
‘Well, it’s like this, sir. That young woman you saw me speaking to—you know who she is, sir, of course—she’s been threatening me—charging me with being responsible for her being in a certain condition—which I know for a fact I’m not responsible for it and couldn’t have been responsible for it. And I know who is responsible for it, what’s more—that old swine with the eyeglass—Prossip. She as good as told me so herself a while back, before she started this game with me, though she won’t admit it now. Well, what I wanted to ask you, sir, and how you may be kind enough to help me is—can I go into a police-station and lay a charge against her of trying to extort money from me by threats which I can prove on oath are false? For it’s blackmail she’s after, sir, that’s what her game is. You’d never think she was the dangerous little—I’ll show you a letter I got from her yesterday.’
He produced a soiled sheet of paper from his hip-pocket and came round to Whalley’s side to exhibit it. Whalley glanced at it and, when he had seen the address at the top, shook his head.
‘If you mean to do anything, Chidgey,’ he said, turning away, ‘see a solicitor. Take my advice, however, and do nothing.’
‘It’s killing me, sir,’ said Chidgey. ‘My life isn’t worth living. I can’t eat and I can’t sleep and I can’t read. I can’t do anything without thinking about it. Sometimes I feel like going down and chucking myself into the river. Well, thank you, sir. You’ll excuse me for troubling you, I hope.’
But Chidgey was relieved. For a moment he had made up his mind to take even the most desperate of steps to rid himself of the fear that had made his life a poisoned hell for the past three weeks. But the moment he had begun to tell his story aloud and put it into words he had realised that he couldn’t face it—that he couldn’t walk into a police-station and say, ‘I want to charge a girl with accusing me falsely of having got her in the family way’—that he didn’t want to do anything. And now he had been advised, by a lawyer, to do nothing. To do nothing was no longer funk; it was the right thing to do—advised by a lawyer. He had always liked the look of Mr Whalley—one of the right sort. He went back to the garage comforted, and a little regretful that he hadn’t thought to say a word about poor little Mrs Whalley.
She was still there, then …
But the anxiety remained. At any moment she might leave Abbey Road and disappear completely. To find her again, even if she remained in Rockwood, might easily prove an impossibility; one would have to depend almost entirely upon chance. The search for her would involve delay. The Prossips, too, might leave their present quarters—perhaps leave Guildford. They, too, would have to be found again.
She had been a month with the Grevilles now. Why wait? What was there to wait for?
He strove with his impatience. But his days were weeks—the month had been a year. For ages and ages he had spoken to no one, except to Ridgeway and the assistants and messengers of the shops at which he dealt. No one had spoken to him. No one was aware of him. He was forgotten.
4
On the whole Mr Prossip was pleased with Guildford and the Deepford Residential Hotel. He liked the High Street and walked up one side of it and down the other twice every fine morning before he went to play his nine holes and twice every fine afternoon before he went back to the Deepfor
d’s lounge to play bridge until dinner-time. He liked the people you saw shopping in the High Street—smart live women and men who, though they dressed a bit carelessly, were unmistakably sahibs. He liked to turn into the Angel for a sherry and bitters on his way back from the links. And he had already had some very pleasant little trips to London—very pleasant indeed. Though London wasn’t what it had been.
The Deepford was very gay and comfortable and the cooking not at all bad, though his table in the dining-room was just beside a door and always in a draught. The guests came and went, but there were always a number of bright young things and always some unmistakable sahibs of his own age to play bridge with and hob-nob with in the bar. To these he had conveyed that he was feeling a draught of another sort and had decided to shut up his place down in Westshire until things cheered up—if they ever did. It was damn pleasant to sit in the bright little bar and talk to unmistakable sahibs about the Land Tax and his bit of shooting and what the Duke had said to him one day out with the Beauforts. Damn pleasant, too (though, of course, that five-point-nine had ended his dancing days), to watch the bright young things dancing—glued together—not caring a damn who saw them. Gave you something to think about in bed, instead of worrying about things. The bright young things liked his little jokes and his paternal winks. On the whole, he thought, he was about the most popular person in the hotel.
Mawjery, as usual, was making herself a bit of a nuisance. She was sulky because she was plain and a rotten dancer and because the management had objected to her violin. However, fortunately she had raked out some school-friends in Farnham who went in for music and all that, and spent most of her time with them. He had bought her a second-hand Baby to encourage her to go to Farnham as often as possible. The more she was away from the Deepford the better. He didn’t want more rows about her violin-playing; he had had enough of that sort of thing.